It has been said that roughly 80% of all e-mail is now SPAM, and everyone is used to filtering or deleting it and the profit for spammers has dried up somewhat. Now comes the next big threat to our sanity. Spammers will always make use of any medium where massive numbers of messages can be sent out at low costs, and the new and growing popularity for cheap VOIP (Voice Over Internet Protocol) calls means it won’t be long before spammers start targeting that media for sending unsolicited junk messages. How annoyed are you going to be when you check your voice mail and have to wade though ads for fake Viagra and the like?
It is unlikely that voice spam will be as popular with spammers as e-mail is, because although VOIP is cheap, it isn’t free like e-mail and sending 10 million VOIP SPAM will still cost a fair bit of money. Also, voice is a audio medium and as such there are no links to follow, so it’s going to have an even lower catch rate then e-mail SPAM. That’s the good news, the bad news is that filtering VOIP SPAM is going to be much harder then filtering e-mail, because e-mail is basically a text format requiring only a text parser to read, voice SPAM is trickier because it is a form of binary (or audio) medium, and a normal text parser isn’t going to do the job. Still, smart minds are apparently already working on ways to filter it. See this article on TheRegister for more.
